So, I've decided I won't be upgrading to Lion as I have no iDevices, just an iMac, and I see Lion as a bastardization of OS X.
But to use iCloud, you have to use Lion, per this:

"What will happen to the content I have on MobileMe?
Apple has announced a new service called iCloud which will be available this fall and free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users. When you sign up for iCloud, you'll be able to keep your me.com or mac.com email address and move your MobileMe mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service."

It's hard to say at this point. iCloud is a couple months out still, and it isn't even integrated into Lion yet. It is possible that they will offer a downloadable pkg for 10.6, but the lack of information means that the only one who knows what the final requirements are is Apple.

Going to current information, it seems that there is not going to be a web based implimentation of mail for iCloud like there is for MobileMe.

Also, it seems that only iOS 5 and Lion are going to have all the hooks for iCloud built in.

I expect you will be able to use some features in Snow Leopard, but they could be brutal and make Lion the only version of OSX with access.

Click to expand...

Didn't they just fix up the MobileMe web services interface, though? Why would they put so much time and effort into doing that if they were completely getting rid of that? Plus, there still needs to be a place for people to use Find my iPhone from a Mac. Hopefully the web apps won't go away, but will just be moved to the icloud.com domain. But only time will tell.

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